The Story Behind The Term “Hondo-Burger”

So I’ve been using the term ‘Hundo-Burger’ since the start of basketball season last year when McKay scored 98 points against Eagle Point. I wanted to use it during football season last year, but no one came close for me to use it in a ’50-burger’ or ’60-burger’-reference.

I heard the term first used in late-2013/early 2014 while I was writing down in the Rocklin, California area which is about 20 minutes from Sacramento going up I-80 towards Lake Tahoe, from one of the editors I was writing for name Matt Kimel. Hella’ve guy, great sports writer with a Master’s in Journalism and foodie expert (got a few barbecuing ideas from him during my time writing around him as well as becoming a better writer during my time down there).

But Matty Ice would use it on Twitter and I’ve seen him refer to it a handful of time in articles if I recall correctly, and the first-time in the Fall of 2014 I think I remember him using it around me was at a football game I was covering….Del Oro-De La Salle or another Del Oro game I was covering and I was confused by it so he broke it down like I did above.

So I like the concept of it, and down in California there’s a lot of quirky writers down there that have fun with writing, the traditional concepts are there of course along with the ethics in mind when we do it, but we know there’s a time-and-place to work in the quirkiness with the teams we covered. You see some of the same kind of quirkiness in writers in Southern Oregon, and a handful of it in Northern Oregon as well but not as much as Grants Pass, Medford and in California.

Even Joe Davidson at the Sacramento Bee, who’s like Bill Poehler of the Statesman, shared the same quirkiness as Matt and was interacting the same way we were up the 80. There were times where Davidson referred to the ‘burger’-phrase and credited Matt on it since he started it. We were all more friendly down there with each other in terms of writers and interacting with one another.

For me and a few others writers I know down there who were coming out of college at the time and breaking into the field, picked up on the quirkiness and incorporated that into our styles of writing or broadcasting.

So that’s the story behind the Hundo-burger and the term of the ‘-burger’ and why and how I started using it.